This invention relates generally to network communications, and more particularly but not exclusively, to determining search results of web sites relevant to use by limited capability mobile devices.
Many mobile computing devices, such as personal digital assistants, cellular phones, and the like, may be employed to communicate voice messages, emails, text messages, and so forth. These limited capability mobile computing devices are becoming increasingly common, and many people are also using these mobile devices to search for information over the Internet. It is not uncommon to see a person on a bus, train, or even a boat, using their mobile device to search for merchants, restaurants, music, or the like. However, accessing such information typically requires conventional web pages and/or conventional web services to be reduced, reformatted, or otherwise specially configured for display or other use by limited capability mobile devices. This mobile web data may be stored separately from, or dynamically generated from, conventional web pages and/or web services.
Conventional web pages, services and other data are generally designed to be accessed through a larger viewing area with a conventional browser application running on a general purpose computing device. For example, a hypertext markup language (HTML) web page can be displayed with a Mozilla® Firefox® browser running on a personal computer. There is often extensive anchor text and metadata associated with conventional web data, which has been developed over the years to help identify and organize conventional web data. Web crawlers and other analysis tools have also been used to determine links and other relationships between web pages, web sites, web service, and other conventional web data. An individual web site may further organize conventional web data into numerous hosts, each of which is associated with a particular topic, such news, sports, travel, entertainment, and the like. Host trust information and other meta information is typically available for various conventional web hosts. This information provides some rating of a given domain and has been collected over a period of time, and from a vast source of conventional web data, and is hence considered to be reliable information.
However, mobile web pages and other mobile web data typically have less metadata, less content, less overall quantity, and less accessibility. A consequence is that mobile web data is generally not as well interrelated and not as well organized. For example, mobile web data may be organized with simple paths of a single domain rather than being organized with hosts. In addition, the formatting and structure of mobile web data is generally incompatible with general purpose browsers, and conventional web data is generally incompatible with mobile device browsers. For example, many mobile devices use a wireless application protocol (WAP) and display wireless markup language (WML) web pages that are not compatible with conventional browsers that operate on a PC. Worse yet, naming conventions may be inconsistent between mobile web sites, mobile web pages, mobile web services, and other mobile web data. With these limitations, a mobile device user may be unable to readily search for and locate information that is accessible with only a limited capability mobile device. Accordingly, there is a need in the industry to provide mobile device users with an improved mechanism for searching and locating web content with their mobile device.
However, simply duplicating the data structures, organizations, and tools used for conventional web data will not necessarily work for mobile web data configured for limited capability mobile devices. Moreover, duplicating a conventional web data system is inefficient, since the host trust information and other aspects of the conventional web data system already exist, but are not necessarily associated with mobile web data. Even if a conventional web data system were duplicated for mobile web data, it would not operate efficiently, since the mobile web data is generally not interlinked well. Therefore, it is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.